Building/Rebuilding a Laptop

I use a laptop at work on a daily basis. Maybe not necessarily true in all parts of the country, but here I seem to be the only one carrying a medical bag and a laptop into the hospital every day -- not just to the office. Hard to even see doctors other than neurologists carrying medical bags -- it's for all our toys. And this is separate from the desktop I use in the office, where actually (hard to explain), I may have the desktop and my laptop running at the same time. Sometimes I feel like those performing musicians with multiple keyboards.

I use my laptop for keeping track of patients/charges in a database, making my own EMG (electromyography) reports, printing out prescriptions, and making a weekly report of our Team Conference on the rehabilitation unit. Let me explain to the furrowed eyebrows out there.

The patient database keeps me compulsive about tracking and submitting these things -- you don't get paid for something you don't send to the insurance company. The EMG reports allow me to have a set and recognizable format for my reports, which look much the same whether I do them in the hospital or the office. Sort of like branding. And, I can do an EMG, and if the patient is going straight to the doctor's office, hand them the final report (typo-free) as they leave (takes about 5 minutes). Try to get your hospital's transcription department to duplicate that. Side benefit: if a doc calls me about an EMG I did last week, last month, six months ago, I have the report with me and can look it up. For that matter I still have, for example, my charges from Wednesday, June 9, 2004 with me also.

I print out patients' prescriptions on Avery labels that fit on a prescription pad. In the hospital I also print a copy on plain paper to take to the office as a record of what I prescribed. It takes some pharmacists aback when they see these printed prescriptions, but no one complains. (My patients ask me, "Why don't all doctors do this?") The team conference reports are for my benefit -- they show week by week a patient's progress, so when I dictate the discharge summary, I have it right there in a format that's useful to me, not in several different sections of the chart.

For these kinds of things, a PDA just won't cut it. I'm into heavy-duty touch typing here. Templates when possible, database lingo, sure, but lots of typing.

So back to where the title thought it was going -- I really need my laptop or my whole work flow is seriously disrupted. But there's this thing about laptops, with all the advancements in CPUs, sizes of memory chips, hard drives, they have a woefully disappointing lifetime. I have a hard time getting one to last more than 2-3 years (and that's with repairs), a small fraction of that for my desktops. My current laptop developed the fatal flaw -- the LCD screen. When the LCD screen goes, you're dead. Replacing other parts isn't such a big deal -- drives, memory, etc. And unfortunately, the screen has been the final blow for most of my laptops -- usually not a do it yourself project, and you spend $400-600 for repair to still have a used laptop waiting for the next thing.

Now you can buy something called "barebones notebooks", which include the chassis (body), motherboard, LCD screen, maybe an optical drive, but no RAM, no hard drive, no CPU, and as an added bonus (for me), no OS, ie NO WINDOWS. You choose and put those in yourself. The advantages are that you learn how to replace these and you can do it as needed whenever you want. If your LCD screen dies, you can replace the entire chassis and reuse your hard drive, etc. You can go as fancy as you want; I was looking at chassis prices for my purposes of $400-500 -- seems expensive, but that's about the same or less than paying to replace just the LCD screen, or if you consider perhaps replacing the laptop, you avoid all the loading of your software and configuring the new laptop (a job I really don't look forward to).

For now, I can probably punt -- the company I bought this one from says they can sell me a used but serviceable chassis for $375 -- sounds like a deal.